Microcontrollers that are used in various embedded systems control, among others, actuators and sensors. Actuators are distinguished in that they are supplied with signals at particular times and in many cases also must be actuated simultaneously in order to perform a function. Such output signals are typically actuated with highly complex timer architectures. Here, a plurality of output signals can be outputted on the basis of prespecified timestamps, counter values, or by triggering of the cells among one another.
In conventional solution approaches, it has turned out to be disadvantageous that only adjacent cells in an increasing sequence, or chains of cells in an increasing sequence, which may not be interrupted, can mutually trigger one another. If the triggering is carried out on the basis of a time value, previous architectures have the disadvantage that they have to reload the corresponding time values for producing new signals by CPU, which causes a high interrupt load on the main CPU.